Comments by "mindstalk" (@mindstalk) on "Life Where I'm From" channel.

@GNMi79 Okay, bigot.
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@JustinKoenigSilica You sound like someone playing life on easy mode.
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What were the bus frequencies like? The ones in Osaka seemed terrible (30 minutes), but Osaka is a train-heavy city. The tourist circulator in Nara was great (4 minutes), but I don't know if the other buses there are like that.
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@zam023 No, most Japanese streets are "local streets". It's where the front door goes, and carries foot, bike, and (one-way) car traffic. And it's on the order of 16 feet / 5 meters wide, wall to wall. Then the actual high traffic streets should have 4-meter wide sidewalks, carrying bikes and (possibly nervous) pedestrians.
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Amazon has bikes for as cheap as $125, don't know how good they are. Zizzo folding bikes are supposed to be good, and you can get one in the $200s; I got a nicer one for $380.
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1. As far as I know, not in general. (The video does mention a 5000 yen rebate for seniors to give up their driving license.) It's just sensible to bike when you have short trips and biking is cheap and safe. If you could bike at 3x your walking speed with minimal risk, why wouldn't you bike? There are dis_incentives to _driving_. Expensive gas, maybe harder to get a license, and above all, parking. No curbside parking and minimal parking mandates, so if you're driving in a city like Osaka or Tokyo you _will be paying to park everywhere. If you rent an apartment then you have to show the police that you've leased a garage parking space before you're allowed to buy and register a car, and that parking could be 30,000 yen a month. Also, where I lived in Osaka, most of the supermarkets around me didn't even have car parking. One was off-street, only accessible by foot or bike (with a huge bicycle hangar). One was on the street but on Street View I don't see any car parking, while there are bikes surrounding its two open walls. The other two were in the basements of train stations (and their associated malls); there were (paid) parking garages but you'd still have to get your groceries upstairs and into an adjacent building. And all four of those were within a 8-12 minute walk of my house -- my tiny house on a tiny lot, which did not have any car parking of its own, on a tiny street which you could drive down _very carefully_. So, you could walk or bike; drive to and pay for a garage and then walk down to the basement, in probably more time than just biking or even walking over; or drive further to some hypothetical supermarket further out that might actually have convenient car parking. Or in my case, walk from home to pick up my car from a garage or parking lot, to then drive...
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"better for the environment" what, that's ridiculous
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Most bike use is in cities.
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He said "sister-in-law Akko"
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@Bionickpunk I would also guess a futon (proper Japanese one, a 3-section folding mattress, not US couch-beds), and maybe low tables that you'd kneel at (Japanese people are more likely to still be able to kneel comfortably for long periods.)
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Dedicated bike infrastructure (apart from parking) is mostly non-existent. What they have instead are lots of narrow (16 feet / 5 meter) wavy streets shared by all users, with 30 KPH speed limits and even lower practical speeds. And then the big streets will typically have 4 meter-wide sidewalks used by pedestrians and most bicyclists, with lots of bollards or barriers to fend off an errant car. The key thing is being separated from fast cars: either the cars are slow (narrow local streets) or you're safely on a wide and protected sidewalk. (Less safe for the pedestrians on the same sidewalk, oh well...) I did see a lot of bike parking at train stations, included paid secured parking. Tokyo reportedly has big underground bike vaults to handle all the bikes parked at its stations.
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@Bionickpunk Perhaps when you grow up you'll learn that other people can have different preferences than you.
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@Bionickpunk Immature copycat retort that doesn't even make sense. I already know you don't like such apartments. That's fine, no one is trying to force you to live in one. You are the one assuming that everyone else would react the same as you. And you are wrong. Many people will last long in such housing, without claustrophobia. The building is close to full with tenants. Even if people don't want to live in such places for more than a few years, that's fine, there's a place for cheap and small housing people can use for a while. There's no reason for such housing to be illegal, especially when it's making use of an awkward piece of land that would otherwise go to waste.
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@Bionickpunk I'm not subjecting anyone to it. If people didn't want to live in them, the units would go empty. As for green space, I'm not sure such a narrow strip would actually be attractive, but anyway it's private land_. If the local city wants to buy the land and make a tiny park, it's free to. Otherwise, the owner should be free to do what they want -- which in this case was building cheap housing for 6 people. Something you apparently want to prohibit because _you can't imagine living there.
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From past exposure, I'd say there's actually a decent chance there's a place to install a small clothes washer. (Japan, like German, tends to expect tenants to bring their own appliances, even fridge or maybe stove.)
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"I have to make sure I look behind me to ensure a bike doesn't sneak up on me" Yeah, I learned that too (look back before moving left or right). I also accidentally caused a collision once: I saw a bike coming and stepped out of its way; old guy next to me stepped back for some reason, putting him in way of the bike. No injury resulted, but oops. It was a particularly narrow path, I think narrowed by construction scaffolding. Massachusetts shares Missouri's "bike on sidewalks outside of business districts", and after a few years of close calls with cars, I used that more and more, along with parks or low-traffic residential streets.
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Wow, and here I thought my Airbnb in Osaka was impressively small. That was technically a detached 2-story house (with like 3 cm of air gap from the next building), long and narrow and tapering. Kind of 3x7 meters except I don't think the widest point really hit 3 m. Still, total of 30-40 m2. Narrow and very steep stairs (ladder, really); I ended up just leaving my luggage downstairs and only going up to sleep, so most of the upper space was wasted for me. No tub, just minimal toilet and shower stall. Two gas burners, two sinks next to each other, mini-fridge, clothes washer. For just me, living out of my bags and laptop, it was mostly fine; if I had a friend over for dinner and anime, we had to maneuver around each other a bit. Was about $1000/month in 2019. One objective complaint about such narrow places, stretching along a street, is that they have no depth. Any sound from the street, like old people talking to each other at 7 AM, is a short distance from your head. I guess longer distance once you go further up. But that was annoying.
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There are many reasons we don't have units like this, ADA is the least of it. For typical US zoning that building a) violates parking mandates b) exceeds the allowed lot coverage c) exceeds the allowed height limit d) is smaller than the minimum unit and bedroom sizes e) doesn't have mandated setbacks b-e are somewhat waive-able in higher density areas[1] but (a) has been nigh-universal. No one is going to build 150 sqft apartments when you also have to provide 350 square feet of parking to go with it. [1] And 75% of US urban land is zoned for detached single family houses only, on minimum lots of often 1/8 acre (5000 sqft) or more. A huge difference in Japan is that that concept does not exist: Residential zoning is simply Residential, there's no zoning for single vs. multi-family, or owned vs. rental housing. The zoning simply prescribes building size, and you're free to stuff as many people in as you can convince to live there. Equally important, a small building like that would have no parking mandate.
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@louisazraels7072 I totally agree! But the US does have parking mandates, even for dense urban areas.
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Heh, reminds me of the 1950 Disney video "Motor Mania" (you can find it on Youtube), about some nice guy turning rude as soon as he got behind the wheel.
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I've also seen "utility bike" for the category that includes omafiets and mamachari. My previous bike was basically a kit-bashed US approximation of that: cheap and heavy hybrid bike, added baskets and fenders.
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@gundamzerostrike Yeah, there's all that biking in Japan because the streets are a lot safer than in most countries. No dedicated paths like Dutch ones, but narrow slow shared streets, or wide sidewalks along fast streets.
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@alquinn8576 "Biden's America" lol, blue states have lower traffic fatalities per capita. Not only did you make this gratuitously political, you got it wrong.
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